


Good Bones

by damnslippyplanet



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Ghost Will Graham, Hannibal is Hannibal, M/M, Mind the Author Notes, Remix, Sharing a Body, canon-typical creepiness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-26 03:03:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12049944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnslippyplanet/pseuds/damnslippyplanet
Summary: Something roils Will’s stomach and he’s not sure whether it’s nausea or interest.  He wasn’t particularly good at identifying his own emotions in life, and the longer he’s dead, the less he’s sure that any of his reactions are what they would have been even then.“You can come closer and look if you want,” Hannibal murmurs, almost but not quite to himself.Knowing full well that he shouldn’t, Will does.





	Good Bones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PragmaticHominid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PragmaticHominid/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文 available: [Good Bones（拾骨）](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12791937) by [ElisaDay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElisaDay/pseuds/ElisaDay)
  * Inspired by [Hungry Ghost](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10185203) by [Pragnificent (PragmaticHominid)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PragmaticHominid/pseuds/Pragnificent). 



> Are you supposed to tag for major character death when the entire premise is "Ghost Will"? I don't know. I'm erring on the side of caution here, but if you're okay with that, read on. That's the only major character death, and it occurs before the story starts. Other possible warnings: body sharing of a consensual sort, Hannibal being canon-typical levels of creepy.
> 
> This story started out as one thing and became another as it went along, as things tend to do when Will "Screw Your 'Outline', I Do What I Want" Graham is your protagonist. I hope that the somewhat disparate pieces of it end up holding together reasonably well despite that but to whatever extent they don't, the fault is all mine and not a flaw in pragnificent's original story, which is perfection and which you should absolutely read.

  _The fear: that nothing survives. The greater fear: that something does._

_~Richard Siken, “The Language of the Birds”_

 

Will dies sometime in the early hours of a Saturday morning.  It’s not a pleasant death, but then he never expected his would be.

It takes some time for him to realize that he is neither alive nor, precisely, gone.  He doesn’t know how to feel about that or whether he is still capable of feelings.  He thinks he is cold and hungry, but the cold rests in his belly and the hunger crawls over his skin.  Perhaps he’s mixed them up, or forgotten what the words mean.

There’s a sound.  It's what a scream would sound like if it could exist without flesh to shape and restrain it - a formless thing, spreading and sinking like blood.

The birds drowsing in the old oak tree outside the window startle, but settle quickly when the noise ends.  No further sound comes from the house: not that day, or that week.  

Will Graham was an isolated man, and it takes a long time before anyone notices he’s vanished.

* * *

Eventually Will’s belongings are hauled away and the house put on the market.  He’s gotten a bit more control of himself by then and remembered a few more things about his life and his death.

The man he’ll later know as Hannibal doesn’t catch his interest any more than any of the other potential buyers at first. Later, he’ll be amused by that.  He notes that the man seems too well dressed for a life in the woods, and that he spends more time than most in prodding around odd bits of the house - the basement, the crawlspace, even a cursory look at the junk piled in the attic.  Will judges that if he buys the house he’ll send in a crew to wreck it, and won't set foot in the place again until it's rebuilt into something huge and offensive.

Will doesn’t accord the man any real attention.  When the realtor starts in on the good bones of the place, he lets himself drift out and away before he has to hear what renovation atrocities the two of them cook up.  A third floor, perhaps, or a swimming pool.

Will _liked_ his small house and his small life. He’s not sure yet what to think of his death.

He’s been investigating what he can do, beyond attempt to menace realtors who don’t seem to be able to see him.  His boundaries don’t seem to line up with anything marked on a survey or deed. He can go well past the driveway in front of the house, but only halfway to the nearest neighbor behind.  He can see the stream that cuts across one corner of his property where he used to spend so many of his days, but try as he might he can’t reach it.  Something strains in his chest when he passes the biggest oak tree, tugs at him until he feels it might crack him apart.

(“Apart”, as if there is anything of him left to hold together.  He hasn’t yet managed to solidify enough to stir so much as a dust mote.  He’s little more than an errant gust of wind.  It seems unfair that he should still have boundaries or feel pain.)

Will isn’t angry about his death - unless perhaps he’s so angry he can’t let himself feel it at all - but he’s furious about being cut off from his stream. He feels a white-hot flare of rage as he watches a squirrel hop merrily past Will's own invisible border.

* * *

The “for sale” sign vanishes and a stream of people arrive: home inspectors, a roofer, and an electrician. Will hovers behind the latter in deep and sincere frustration as he makes an utter mess of a wiring job Will could have done twice as well in half the time.  The electrician twitches and shivers and packs up in a rush. Will is savagely pleased to have him gone from a space that still feels like Will’s own, even if the paperwork disagrees.

The overdressed man who bought Will’s house defies his expectations by showing up in person after all. Will’s sense of time is vague but he thinks that the man’s presence is irregular at first; he shows up for an afternoon to measure every inch of the kitchen and move in a few small and stupidly ornate pieces of furniture, then vanishes for a stretch of time that feels like days or weeks.

He turns up again with at least three times as many clothes as Will ever owned, easily outstripping the available closet space in the big bedroom.  The expression on the man’s face as he tries to fit one shirt too many into the overstuffed closet makes a strange feeling ripple through Will like bubbles rising to a surface.   _Laughter_ , he thinks, startling himself with the sudden recollection that such a thing exists, and does it again.

The man tilts his head just a fraction, arrested in mid-motion.  His gaze sweeps the room.  It slides easily through and past Will, and then Will doesn’t feel like laughing at all.

* * *

Will watches uncertainly as the man moves in.  It seems as if he should be more upset than he is.

Hannibal - he learns the man’s name from an overheard phone call - isn't precisely what Will had predicted.  After the initial rush of contractors, he seems intent on doing the rest of the work himself.  Hannibal begins to clear out the junk left in the basement, one car-load at a time.  He strips the wallpaper from the smaller bedroom and repaints it over the course of a weekend, humming to himself.  He works methodically and with scrupulous care. Will finds himself drawing near without meaning to.  He hates the color of the new paint, but Hannibal’s brushwork is good and his edges are clean.  It could be worse, Will supposes.  He'd always meant to do something about that wallpaper one day.

Hannibal’s living presence - the warmth and sound of him filling up all the space Will can't - makes Will uncomfortably aware that he’s dead and cold and silent. It makes him want to stay near, as if he might be able to borrow some of that warmth for himself.  

When Hannibal leaves - and he does, for days at a time, this is clearly a second home for him - Will feels a hollow sensation. _Loneliness_ , he thinks, trying a fuzzy memory of the emotion on for size to see if it matches the sensation of abandonment.

* * *

When Hannibal finds Will’s body in the trunk in the attic, he doesn’t do anything about it.  

Will’s forgetting what it was like to be human, although he remembers enough to know he was never very good at it in the first place. But he’s fairly sure that anyone else would have called the police.  It’s probably too late after all this time to catch his killer, but his former colleagues would make an effort.  Someone would call his father.  There would someday be a neglected headstone in an overgrown cemetery, if Hannibal picked up the phone.

Hannibal doesn’t make any calls that day or the next.  He leaves Will’s bones undisturbed when he clears out the rest of the attic.  He doesn’t open the trunk again, but he brushes the dust off and lays his hands on the lid for a few moments like a doctor or a priest: a benediction.

Will tries to remember or imagine what it felt like to touch things or to be touched.

He tries to imagine what sort of man finds a body in his attic and does nothing.  His still-vivid imagination serves up many options, none of them comforting.

* * *

Some vestige of respect for human social convention makes Will respect Hannibal’s privacy for several weeks.  He may listen in on the man’s phone calls, starved for human voices and scraps of information about the world beyond the tiny stretch of Wolf Trap he’s bound to, but he doesn’t watch Hannibal bathe or dress or whatever else he does in the half-renovated bathroom for interminable periods of time.  There are easily a half-dozen bottle of lotions and scents he lines up neatly on the sink’s edge where Will used to keep a single bottle of hand soap, but they're the least of Will’s curiosities about the man he shares his house with.

The day Will finally breaches that invisible line in the sand, he’s driven less by actual curiosity about Hannibal’s habits and more by annoyance at his own clinging to human notions of propriety. Being whatever he is isn’t anything he asked for, but there’s no point in pretending it’s not happening. 

It’s perhaps the sheer force of his annoyance with himself that propels him all the way to visibility for the first time. It’s the most strongly he’s felt about anything since he woke up dead.  Will’s not there and then he is: nothing he did intentionally, but he can feel it the instant it happens.  The entire world snaps into a sharper, richer focus around him as he forces a place for himself within it.

Hannibal appears significantly less surprised to see Will’s reflection in the bathroom mirror behind him than Will himself feels.  He hasn’t seen his own face in so long.  He doesn’t know which of their reflections to look at first. His gaze ends up skittering past them both.

 “ _There_ you are,” Hannibal says.  

He says it as if he expected Will.  As if he’d been waiting.

Will startles and blinks out of existence, and stays that way as long as he can stand it.

* * *

“As long as he can stand it” turns out not to be long, but when Will comes back, he’s more cautious.  He feels vulnerable, as if he’s exposed something that he hadn’t meant to.

He keeps his distance for a while but he can’t seem to  stay away entirely.  He haunts the edges of his own home, hovering invisibly at the fringes of Hannibal’s life.  Hannibal talks to himself more often now, as if he suspects Will might be listening.  He talks about the origins of recipes he’s making, and his favorite performances of the operas he listens to as he works.

Once Hannibal asks the empty air of the living room, his hand hovering over two fabric swatches, “Which of these do you like better?” He waits a very long time for a response and looks faintly disappointed when no answer is forthcoming.  

The blue one is better.  Will is quietly pleased when Hannibal chooses it.

* * *

When Hannibal isn’t home, Will practices visibility until it comes easily.  

His reflection in the mirror hurts too much to look at but he catches sidelong glimpses of himself in windowpanes and in the shiny surfaces of Hannibal’s renovated kitchen. He thinks he’s thinner now than he was in life. He looks like a version of himself ground down by a whetstone: made lethal.

He experiments briefly with changing his appearance but if it’s possible, he can’t grasp how and it doesn’t interest him enough to keep at the attempt.  Agency in the world is what Will craves and where he spends his effort.  He practices solidity and focus until he can budge a pencil a few centimeters, then lift a book six inches off the table.  On one triumphant day he manages to shove Hannibal’s armchair several feet to its right.

He doesn’t return the armchair to its assigned place.  Invisible, he keeps watch the next day when Hannibal returns.  Hannibal pauses for a moment and then simply nudges the side table closer to the armchair’s new position, askew as it is.  When he settles in to read that night he looks entirely pleased with the situation.  

Frustrated for no particular reason he could put into words, Will knocks over one of Hannibal’s statues.  It isn’t satisfying: Hannibal barely flinches.

* * *

When Hannibal finally starts to work on the basement, his brisk efficiency suddenly evaporates.  He lingers over the work.

He tells Will about the work.

Will thinks that he would have put the pieces of Hannibal together sooner in life, if he’d been able to see him in the world and not only here.  But here in the protected bubble of Will’s house and Will’s death, he hadn’t fully _seen_ until Hannibal told him.  And Hannibal does tell him.

The hooks go into the ceiling. The band saw comes down the stairs and the soundproofing onto the walls. Hannibal tells Will about all of them: the uses he’s put them to in the past and the ones he’s planning for the future.  

“It’s begun to feel reckless, having all of this in my basement in Baltimore,” he says, stretching upward to work on a bit of pipe that’s almost out of reach. “And I’ve learned so much since I set up that house. This will be much better.”

 _More efficient_ , he explains, rolling out a precisely pencilled floor plan on the workbench.  He traces the workflow of the space with an elegant gesture: table to saw to sink, no wasted motions or retraced steps.   _Easier drainage_. _Better tools._  A length of chain rattles as it dangles loosely from Hannibal’s hand.

It’s fine workmanship in service of a terrible purpose.  Will’s fairly sure that he’s always been someone who appreciates a job done properly.

Something roils Will’s stomach and he’s not sure whether it’s nausea or interest.  He wasn’t particularly good at identifying his own emotions in life, and the longer he’s dead, the less he’s sure that any of his reactions are what they would have been even then.

“You can come closer and look if you want,” Hannibal murmurs, almost but not quite to himself.

Knowing full well that he shouldn’t, Will does.

* * *

The day Hannibal opens the attic trunk again in search of Will’s wallet and his name, Will very nearly lets himself materialize.  No one’s said his name in so long.

Instead he takes visible form late that night.  He shimmers into existence between one of Hannibal’s steady sleeping heartbeats and the next.  Hannibal knows his name now. Will feels unstable, some center of balance shifted.

Will is not physically strong enough to hold a pillow down over Hannibal’s face, but he’s strong enough and quick enough to lift and use a knife.  

He supposes there is a version of the future where no one dies in the basement kill room, and that it hinges on his own actions. He stands in the moonlight for a long time and watches that future slip away beyond retrieval before he lets himself fade again.

* * *

It’s not even a week after the basement is complete that Hannibal brings the man home.  Will is out in the woods tracing his boundaries again, but he knows almost immediately. The violent surge of Hannibal’s delight, as much as the other man’s terror, calls Will home. 

He feels like he’s vibrating out of his skin with the urge to become visible: to be _seen_.

He recognizes the man immediately. Hannibal had sketched him a few nights prior by the firelight, shading in his hair almost absently as he explained what the man had done to earn his ire. _Offensive assumptions_ , Hannibal had mused.

Will could have tried to stop Hannibal then.  He could try to stop him now.  But he needs to know what will happen more than he needs to stop it from happening.

What happens is that the soundproofing swallows up the screams just as it should, Hannibal’s fine and meticulous work paying off.  But Will somehow _feels_ as if he’s the one swallowing up the sound, absorbing it into himself. As if it’s crawling under his skin and finding a home there.  He feels sick and giddy and, ever so briefly, _alive_.

What happens is that when the man sees Will, in whatever vague semi-coherent way he does since Will is not entirely visible, Hannibal just... _stops_.  Sets down his blade, pulls the gag from the man’s mouth, and sits down to have what nearly amounts to a friendly conversation with him. About Will.  

Hannibal seems delighted - _is_ delighted. Will can feel that as readily as he feels the victim’s terror, as if Will’s the one flayed open and unprotected. 

“It’s a pity you aren’t able to see him properly,” Hannibal says. His voice is rich and warm.  “I’ve been trying to capture his likeness but it’s difficult.”

Will’s never seen Hannibal try to draw him.  It must be something Hannibal does when he’s in the city.  It’s the first indication Will’s ever had that Hannibal thinks about him when he’s not there, and it’s unbearable. Will feels trapped: spread out and pinned like a moth in a specimen case.

He’s relieved when Hannibal starts up again, as if the man’s screams are less terrible than that conversation had been.  And then he’s sick at his own relief.

* * *

It’s not difficult to watch the cooking. All the butchery was done downstairs, so in the kitchen it’s really not different from any other night.    

“Ideally, the slices should be thin enough to see through,” Hannibal says to the corner where he seems to sense Will is, holding a strip of some organ meat up to the light.  “I’m afraid I’ve been a bit sloppy here.”

It doesn’t seem to stop him from enjoying the meal, all alone at a dining table big enough to fit six easily.  He eats slowly, savoring each mouthful.

Will can sometimes forget that he’s always hungry. It’s a sort of background radiation like the bone-deep cold, omnipresent and therefore able to be ignored.  But it’s hard to forget when Hannibal cooks.  The meat looks delicious, despite everything Will knows.

* * *

Hannibal’s gone for several days after that - _keeping up appearances_ , he tells Will when he returns. Seeing patients; being seen about the city by the right people 

While he’s gone, Will discovers that he can reach almost all the way to the neighbor’s yard now and get close enough to the stream to hear its lazy trickle. He’s getting stronger, and chooses not to question why.

He divides his time between the house, where he rifles through Hannibal’s sketchbooks and tries to remember just what color the kitchen tile used to be, and the woods, where he watches the leaves fall and startles the occasional squirrel.  

It’s not the most dignified afterlife, afternoons spent tossing acorns at tree branches, but it helps him get better at lifting and moving small objects.  Once or twice he manages to throw stones all the way into the stream, where they sink without a trace.

* * *

He goes into the basement only once.  Hannibal’s cleaned, but Will still feels as if the air is heavy with copper and salt, choking him with the tang of blood. The blood had been so hot in the chill air, nearly steaming, and Will is still, always, so cold.

He wonders when Hannibal might do it again.

He wonders if Hannibal would make the same sounds if he were the one under the knife.

He wonders if he had made sounds like that, when the killer, his own killer, had closed in.

He doesn’t go to the basement again.

* * *

Possessing Hannibal is a true accident: something Will hadn’t known or even considered that he could do.  Getting too close is a carelessness he’s allowing himself too often now but getting that single inch closer still, until his presence overlays onto Hannibal and animates him, is chance.  

Once done, he’s not sure how it didn’t occur to him before. He’s not sure, for several moments, that he will ever let Hannibal - let _this_ \- go.

Touch, _real touch_ and not the pale imitation of it that Will knows when he focuses his entire being on plucking a leaf from a tree and feels a vague dull pressure against the memory of his skin, is shocking.  His hands -- Hannibal’s hands -- whoever’s hands they are, when Will is the one animating them -- catch against fabric, rougher than they look.

Will can smell something cooking, aromatic and spicy.  The colors of Hannibal’s paints and fabrics are richer than he’d realized.  Hannibal’s sharp inhale sounds in ears that just at this moment feel like Will’s. It’s all too much. Too abrupt, too intense, and Will’s hard-won control over himself is instantly shredded.

It’s all he can do to flee only out of Hannibal’s head and across the room, and not out of the house, all the way to the stream, in search of a place where he does not know the throb of Hannibal’s pulse under his own skin.

 _Try again_ , Hannibal says, ragged and open.  

Will couldn’t say no if he wanted to.  He steps into Hannibal's skin and it feels like a homecoming.

Hannibal is warm.  And only a mild, pleasant sort of hungry.  He’s _curious_  more than anything, Will thinks, but it’s hard to be sure.  His thoughts aren’t as clear as the physical sensations of the body they currently share.

If their roles were reversed Will would be fighting with everything he had to get rid of the invader in his body, but he can’t feel any fight in Hannibal at all.  Hannibal’s alert but not alarmed; there’s no tension in his frame that Will hasn’t brought to it. Will can _feel_ Hannibal’s smile on the face they’re currently sharing.  He raises their hand to their lips to be sure, and Hannibal’s smile rests there.  

When he raises Hannibal’s eyes to see their dim reflection in the window, it’s Hannibal’s face he sees.  Hannibal’s expression.  But the hand just barely touching his mouth trembles as hard as Will feels himself shuddering, and unless it’s a trick of the light, Will’s almost certain that Hannibal’s dark eyes are suddenly blue.

* * *

He stops hiding behind invisibility after that. It seems disingenuous to pretend to some sort of distance that no longer exists, if it ever did.  

* * *

Even if Will didn’t already know that his afterlife is spinning rapidly out of control - and he knows, of course he knows, he’s not what he used to be but he’s not stupid - he’d have figured it out quickly enough. 

Hannibal brings home a second victim and a third in rapid succession.  The screams continue to echo inside Will long after they’ve bled from the air, leaving little room inside him for the aimless frustration that used to fill the days when Hannibal was not here.  He supposes that in this way they feed him as readily as their flesh nourishes Hannibal.  He supposes that he should be more shocked or upset than he is.

Hannibal’s pleasure, in Will’s presence as well as in the killing itself, fills Will up just as readily.  He feels it now whenever Hannibal looks at him, strengthening and changing him.

He feels it, sometimes, after Hannibal has gone to sleep.  Will doesn’t possess him in these times, not really.  But he finds that if he lies close on the bed behind or next to Hannibal, close enough that they would breathe the same air if Will had breath, some of Hannibal’s unconscious mind bleeds out into his.  He catches fragmentary images; voracious, howling things that pass for Hannibal’s emotions; memories and plans that might frighten him if he were something other than what he is.

Hannibal dreams of Will often.  Sometimes as he is now, sometimes as he was when he was human.  Will feels oddly jealous on those nights: that Hannibal would want him to be something else, even in his dreams.

This is how Will first becomes aware that his eyes are starting to change from blue to black; he sees it in Hannibal’s dream, and then when he goes to look, he sees it’s only a reflection of reality.

It should be disconcerting; instead it makes Will feel wonderfully seen.

* * *

Hannibal takes parts of the bodies with him.  Will assumed at first that he was burying or dumping them, but one night Hannibal pulls out his sketchpad and begins to draw for Will. 

The tableaux take shape rapidly under his pencil as Hannibal explains each one.  Will is surprised to learn precisely what Hannibal does with the bodies. He’d thought Hannibal’s dream-visions were just that, fanciful imaginings not enacted in the world.  But once he knows, he’s not surprised that Hannibal’s designs are elaborate, beautiful and vicious.  One of them is funny in a wicked, biting way.  That laughter feeling bubbles up in Will’s throat again.

The sound of Will’s voice, a raspy thing like a door hinge abandoned to rust and ruin, startles them both.  Hannibal’s pencil jumps, ruining the line of the jawbone he’s sketching out, and Will blinks out instinctively before he can see or hear whatever Hannibal would do in response to his voice.

He reappears at the edge of the woods, as far out as he can go, and stays there until he’s sure all the house’s lights have gone dark.  He can go farther than he remembers, it seems, and he spends the night exploring his new borders.

He hums, cautiously at first and then more loudly as he gets used to the sound of his own voice, but he doesn’t try to speak. 

* * *

He avoids Hannibal for days, cloaking himself in invisibility or hidden away in the attic. It’s the sheer force of Hannibal’s wanting that brings him back, finally, and when he materializes he can see why.  Hannibal’s set the table for two, and he wants to _talk_.

( _When does Hannibal_ _not _ _want to talk?_ Will thinks, and he almost laughs again.)  

Hannibal wants _Will_ to talk, about his death.  Will is aware that this is in some sense a cruelty, and equally aware that he barely experiences it as such.  The Will who died in the trunk would hardly recognize the one who feeds off Hannibal’s dreams and his carnage.  He’s able to relay it fairly dispassionately: his illness, the invader Will barely saw and never had a chance to fight off, and the heavy final sound of the trunk lid slamming shut.

“I took a long time to die,” he finishes, and then lets himself smile a smile that he can feel not reaching his eyes. “There wasn’t much blood.  You’d have been bored.”

Hannibal looks anything but bored. He listens rapt, his food all but untouched.  He’s given Will an empty plate but a glass of wine, for reasons that surpass Will’s understanding.

“I find that hard to imagine,” he says. Something in Will twists unpleasantly at the notion that Hannibal could have found his death _interesting_ if he’d been the one to perpetrate it: a mere curiosity, no more or less than any of the lives he’s taken.

“Would you,” he says in a rush, before he can stop himself, “if it had been you...”

His words stagger to a halt.  He hasn’t used them in so long, and even if he had, there are no words for the monstrous thing he wants to know.  

Hannibal gazes at him, fathomless: barely more human than Will is.

“I would have honored you,” he finally says in answer to the question Will didn’t ask.  “Every part.”

* * *

When they bring Will’s bones down from the attic, they do it together: Will’s intention animating Hannibal’s hands, Hannibal’s mind directing Will’s actions.

The basement would be the sensible place for their plans but if Hannibal considers it, he doesn't mention it.  They lay what remains of Will's body out on the porch in the sunlight, and then Will goes away.  He doesn’t want to observe or participate.  It’s enough to know that Hannibal will take care of him: will honor him.

His bones are just a neat bundle wrapped in silk by the time he returns in the evening.  There’s a small bonfire rendering to ashes his wallet and the rags of his clothes and god knows what other parts of him.  The last of Will Graham, gone up in smoke.

Hannibal radiates a fierce pleasure that Will doesn’t need to step into his skin to feel.  He could ride the high of it from six feet away.  But he does it anyway just to feel: the heat of the bonfire licking at Hannibal’s skin, and the ache in Hannibal’s joints from an afternoon spent kneeling on the porch, and the wild, possessive glee Hannibal feels at having been allowed to take Will apart.

If Will would only ask for it, Will knows, Hannibal would make art of Will’s bones.  He’d make a monument of them, a shrine that Will has no desire for.  Perhaps in another world five or six steps to the left of this one, that’s precisely what happens.

In this world, Will has a different idea.

* * *

They walk to the stream side by side, though only Hannibal’s footsteps cause the fallen leaves to crunch.  Will could become solid enough for that if he made the effort but there’s no need. Hannibal doesn’t want him to be anything but what he is.

“I had dogs,” he says to break the too-heavy silence.  “They liked to run around here while I was fishing.  Find every rotted thing in a half-mile and roll in it.  I don’t know what happened to them, after.”

“Dogs,” Hannibal says: considering, perhaps slightly repulsed. Will supposes that if Hannibal had a pet at all it would be something self-sufficient and aloof, a cat or a snake.

“Four,” Will responds just to watch Hannibal twitch. He’s very good at hiding himself away behind imperceptible flickers of emotion, but Will’s lived behind his eyes and knows what he’s seeing.  “It’s good they’re not here. They’d dig me up again within a week.”

Hannibal’s fingers tighten around Will’s silk-wrapped bones as they walk on.

* * *

Hannibal digs Will’s grave deep, perhaps thinking of dogs and other wild things.  Will chooses the spot: a few feet from the stream, under a tree he always liked to lean against to eat his lunch. Hannibal places his bones in the grave reverently and recites something over them in a language Will doesn’t speak. 

When he starts to fill the grave back in, Will flinches as if he might be able to feel the damp earth hitting the bones. But he doesn’t feel anything, not really.

“Do you want a marker?  Some sort of headstone?”

Hannibal’s sleeves are pushed up but trying to droop down again, his hair mussed by the breeze and the work. His shoes are muddy.  It’s a pleasing sight.  Will suspects few have been allowed to see it.

“I don’t need one,” he says after a moment’s thought.  “We’ll remember, and the rest of the world’s already forgotten.”

“That’s difficult to believe,” Hannibal says, but he never knew Will in life. Will doesn’t feel like arguing the point of his own forgettability. He looks at the bundle instead, finally putting his finger on what’s been bothering him about it since they started out.

“He’s not all there, is he?”

Hannibal blinks at him, ever so slightly nonplussed, until Will catches his error: “I’m not all there.”

“I held a few things back,” Hannibal acknowledges, eyes bright as he looks up from his work. “I hope you don’t mind.”

Will supposes that depends on what Hannibal intends to do with them: he waits, silent.

“If this works as you hope,” Hannibal goes on, well used to one-sided conversations with Will after the last several months, “I thought I might take a few of your bones to my other home, to see if that might let you inhabit that space as well.  I would…”  Hannibal pauses and Will tries to process the notion that Hannibal appears to be feeling something like _shy_ after spending the day dismembering Will’s bones, wrist-deep in the remains of his viscera. Hannibal’s eyes drop before he goes on.  “I would like to have you there.”

Will’s not sure whether he likes that idea: to be scattered that far, sundered from himself.  On the other hand: To see the world beyond his own property’s borders again.  To be with Hannibal.

He wonders whether it has occurred to Hannibal that if it does work like that - if he can go where his bones go - then Hannibal could take him anywhere, carried in a pocket.  Together they could see the world that Hannibal has only told Will about.

They could hunt together.

It’s too much to imagine.  Will nearly flickers out.

Instead he makes himself sound as steady as his still-rusty voice can manage and says only, “Let’s see if this worked, first.”

Hannibal nods and returns to his business: honoring Will, burying his bones deep and safe where only the two of them will ever know.  Will leaves him to it.  He takes a step forward and then another, toward the stream.  He makes himself solid for this. Leaves crunch under his feet and a stray bird startles and takes flight.

The invisible barrier doesn’t tug at him.  Perhaps it’s because his bones are here now; perhaps it’s simply because he’s grown stronger, fed on Hannibal’s attention and his blood sacrifices.  Whatever the reason, Will walks to the edge of the stream with no difficulty.  It’s nearly winter and the water must be uncomfortably cold.  No matter. He feels warmed through by an easy peace, unsure and uncaring whether it’s his own or borrowed from Hannibal.

Will turns his face up to the cold autumn sun and wades easily into the quiet of the stream.


End file.
